Slashdot Mirror

smnicoll writes "The European Court of First Instance has thrown out Microsoft's appeal to have penalties for the abuse of monopoly suspended, reports BBC News Online. 'Microsoft's application for interim measures is therefore dismissed in its entirety,' The court's statement said. 'The evidence adduced by Microsoft is not sufficient to show that implementation of the remedies imposed by the Commission might cause serious and irreparable damage.' The commission's case is mainly focused on Microsoft's integration of Windows Media Player into the operationg system and the effects that has on the ability of Real Networks and Apple to get their rival players used." Similar stories at Bloomberg, CNET, and Reuters (via CNN).

troop23 writes "A web worm that identifies potential victims by searching Google is spreading among online bulletin boards using a vulnerable version of the program phpBB, security professionals said on Tuesday. Almost 40,000 sites may have already been infected. In an odd twist if you use Microsoft's Search engine to scan for the phrase 'NeverEverNoSanity'-- part of the defacement text that the Santy worm uses to replace files on infected Web sites--returns nearly 39,000 hits." Reader pmf sent in a few more information links: F-Secure weblog and Bugtraq posting. Update: 12/22 03:34 GMT by T : ZephyrXero links to this news.com article that says Google is now squashing requests generated by the worm.

An anonymous reader sent in a link to this interview with Linus Torvalds, where the questions center on Sun's movement toward the open source world (and Linus' dismissive view of the threat posed by Solaris), as well as a few questions about 2.7 and the future of Linux.

LehiNephi writes "Cnet reports that Walmart is offering a sub-$500 notebook running Linspire. The specs are less-than impressive: a 1GHz VIA C3 processor, 128 MB RAM, 30GB hard drive, and a plain vanilla CD-ROM. Seems overpriced for what you get, but cheap nonetheless. And yes, it does run Linux."

Aziabel writes "As most of you have probably heard, Intel plans to come out with chips containing two processing cores next year, but that's just the start. The Santa Clara, Calif.-based chip giant intends to exploit the concept of using multiple processor cores; chips with four cores and eight cores will eventually join dual-core chips, which will begin to appear from Intel next year. The company's research department is also looking at the feasibility of creating chips with hundreds of cores to assist servers and supercomputers with large numbers of relatively repetitive calculations, said Steve Smith, vice president of the desktop platforms group at Intel. The focus on multiple cores arises from Moore's Law, which dictates that the number of transistors on a chip doubles every two years. I say, the more the better. Keep 'em coming, chip-makers!"

wolverineinspector writes "Mink, LA is finally getting telephone land lines after the neighbouring communities got theirs in 1970. In the article they also say that as many as 6.2% of US homes don't have phone service - that would mean that 19 million Americans don't have wired phone lines available to them."

Iphtashu Fitz writes "The FTC has just issued its final report on how it will define Spam with regards to the federal CAN-SPAM act. According to the FTC, bulk e-mail is commercial if it includes advertising and promotion or if the subject line or beginning of the message would be reasonably considered to be advertising or promotion. This is very similar to the proposed rules that were announced back in August. The modified rules also deal with the issues of transactional messages (an e-mail regarding an order that also includes advertising) and relationship-based e-mail (messages about product updates, etc)."

Aziabel writes "Titan and Dione, two of the moons orbiting Saturn, apparently aren't exactly what researchers had previously believed. Photographs taken during a flyby of the Cassini space probe this week may clarify and even overturn long-held assumptions about the surfaces of these satellites. Bright streaks on the surface of Dione, a heavily cratered moon with little atmosphere, have long been believed to be ice, noted Carolyn Porco, imaging team leader for the Cassini project from the Space Science Institute in Boulder. Images captured this week, however, appear to indicate that the bright streaks are cliffs. They may have been created by ice, but not a lot of ice remains in the area. Meanwhile, the 'ocean' on Titan may not be. Instead of a liquid body of water, the dark mass seen on the surface of the Titan may be a viscous fluid flowing onto the white 'coastline,' Parco said. Then again, the viscous fluid could be flowing down from a higher altitude, like a glacier, onto the white mass. Right now, researchers only have two-dimensional images. Stronger conclusions may be possible with the availability later of images that are more precise, or stereoscopic images that include shadows or information on altitude."

museumpeace writes "ICANN, though it was soundly rebuffed for trying this in the past, is reported by CNET to be planning a $.75/ year fee to holders of .net domains and will look at fees for other TLD's next year. Is this taxation without representation? And where would this trend stop?"

abertoll writes "A federal judge decided that Google is able to sell ads under the GEICO trademark, claiming that this is fair use of the trademark. GEICO's contention was that competing insurance companies were using the name GEICO under which to buy Google Ads, so that when someone searches for GEICO, their ad would come up."

rishimathew writes "Apple Computer has quietly updated its iPod software so that songs purchased from RealNetworks' online music store will no longer play on some of the Mac maker's popular MP3 players." You may remember the backstory: Real found a way to allow their DRM-restricted music to play on iPods, Apple protested, and there was a little back-and-forth. You asked Rob Glaser about the situation, and he said Real had a "comprehensive plan", whatever that means.

SilentChris writes "Good article over at CNet regarding Microsoft's internal IT practices. Some intriguing statements from the CIO, from the obvious ('It's an easy choice for me--to run Microsoft technology. We don't run Unix. We don't run Linux. We don't run Oracle.') to the not-so-obvious ('Our users are the admins of their machines. They can load whatever software they want on their machines, but we do audit the network continuously.') I wonder how much time is spent combatting spyware?"

mdielmann writes "CNet has a story about a lawsuit asking for copyright protection to be removed from software, while leaving patent protection in place. Intellectual-property consultant Greg Aharonian hopes to convince the court that software makers can protect their products adequately through patents, which provide more comprehensive protection but are difficult to obtain and expire in a shorter period of time. It looks like this would hamstring licenses such as the GPL, which are often based on copyright privileges, while leaving OSS vulnerable to patent infringement. Apparently, he's been working on this for the last three years."

mu22le writes "CNET News.com has an interview with Doug Turner, the project leader of Minimo, the version of Mozilla for small devices. The article (also commented upon at mozillazine) roams from the challenges a small devices browser presents to the competition with Opera for Mobile. Brace yourself for the forthcoming Minimo 0.3, due in January."

The New York Times (as carried here by CNET, registration-free) is reporting on what seems like an overdue update planned by the adminstrators of the National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped, which -- thanks to a copyright exemption -- can provide audiobooks without paying royalties. The Library Service will switch from 4-track tape players to audio devices based on flash memory. The article does not mention what sort of codec might be chosen, but does mention a couple of reasons (fragility, and diffculty for use by the blind) to not simply use CDs bearing some compressed audio format. The amount of listenable audio that can be squeezed into readily available pocket-sized storage these days is incredible, at least if you consider listenable things like the 32kbps recordings of old radio shows that the Sherlock Holmes Society of London makes available. (I wonder why small hard drives weren't chosen, though; they seem to bear up pretty well.)

NateDawg writes "After the recent merger of AT&T and Cingular, it looks like Sprint is close to buying out Nextel. According to CNet, the different networks could bring expensive problems, but that could be overcome by the diversity of the company's clients. Nextel has many corporate clients, while Sprint appeals to families and teens."

Grotius writes "As reported in CNET, the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (the court that hears patent appeals) heard oral argument in an appeal from a $565 million award against Microsoft for infringing patent rights held by the University of California and Eolas. The University and Eolas share the rights to a patent that they claim covers plug-ins and applets that are invoked through a Web browser. The case has broad implications for the internet -- Microsoft could be forced to change Internet Explorer and make it incompatible with some web pages. However, the issue before the court was narrow: Whether Microsoft should have been permitted to present evidence to the jury of prior art in the form of an earlier web browser called Viola created by Pei Wei."

An anonymous reader submits "CNet has an update on the status of the New York Times Firefox ad. According to the article, the delays are largely because of the decision to go with 10,000 names rather than the original 2500. The amount of content means each change to the ad requires 15 minutes of rendering. They also must be careful in crafting the ad, so that stay on the advocacy side of things. As a non-profit, they can still qualify for the under $50,000 rate, but if the ad is too commercial, they would need to pay the $130,000+ business rate. They say they're close to finishing, and the ad should run by mid-December, or at the latest, by Christmas. Firefox is also close to 10,000,000 downloads in the first month of release."

McSpew writes "The DVD Copy Control Association has decided to sue Kaleidescape for violating its CSS license. Kaleidescape's crime? They make a super-high-end (~$27k) DVD jukebox system that caches DVD movies onto a server (3.3TB of disk space). Kaleidescape says they've complied with the terms of their CSS license and they're considering countersuing. I want one, but I'm not a pro athlete, rapper or movie star, so I'll probably have to roll my own."

darkstar949 writes "There is an article on CNET News.com that reports the so called 'Halo 2' effect is threatening broadband users. Because of this some ISPs are being pressured for more reliability and low latency. Perhaps this marks a new trend for the internet as online gaming becomes more popular." From the article: "Sandvine's latest statistics showed that Xbox Live traffic quadrupled when "Halo 2" was launched on Nov. 9, and it has stayed at that level since. Sandvine claims that this will put added pressure on ISPs to improve the quality of their broadband offerings, as users will demand reliability and low latency."

metalion writes "True to the saying 'no honor among thieves,' adware company, Avenue Media, is finding that competing adware company, DirectRevenue, is detecting and deleting their software. Now Avenue Media is crying foul and have filed a lawsuit against DirectRevenue stating that DirectRevenue 'knowingly and with intent to defraud, exceeded its authorized access to users' computers.' DirectRevenue acknowledges that it may uninstall competing applications in its user license agreement. A researcher at Harvard University, Ben Edelman, reasons that 'Once the computer is infected with 10 different unwanted programs, the person is likely to take some action to address the situation.' Just how far will adware companies go to continue to attempt to bombard us with their ads?"

JerryP writes "According to this article, an unknown firm called JGR Acquisitions has acquired some 39 patents that apply to a set of key technical protocols known as Web services. The patents offered for sale as part of the liquidation of Commerce One."

vincecate writes "I just purchased a brand new AMD PIC which has been on Slashdot and LinuxDevices. I have opened it up and put some pictures and comments on the web. Some interesting things are that the system uses only 8 watts, the Windows CE does not want you installing any software, you can not get to the BIOS settings, and I was not able to boot Linux." (He was able, though, to boot Linux from an IDE device on a mini-ITX system also based on the Geode processor.)

Even though it's been withdrawn, the Lycos anti-spam screensaver is not forgotten. Rollie Hawk writes "And with this, the 'What's Good for the Goose...' award goes to all those people trying to install that notorious spam-attacking Lycos screen saver but ended up with a Trojan horse instead. This trojan is spreading via email with the subject line 'Be the first to fight spam with Lycos screen saver,' tucked in an innocent-looking file called 'Lycos screensaver to fight spam.zip.' According to F-Secure, this trojan contains keylogger elements but little more has been specified. The only question I have is how long until the 'I promise to clean that trojan disguised as a DDoSing Lycos screen saver.exe' virus gets released."

It was rumored before, but now, as Rick Zeman writes, "It's official: According to news.com, IBM has sold their PC business in a complex arrangement where, 'under the deal, IBM will keep an 18.9 percent stake in Levono. Lenovo will pay $1.25 billion for the IBM PC unit and assume debt, which will bring the total cost to $1.75 billion. Lenovo will pay roughtly $650 million in cash and $600 million in securities.' Plus, Lenovo will be able to use the IBM and Think names for 5 years."

VaultX points to an article on CNET (linked below), writing "According to Dell, Red Hat needs to lower pricing. 'We believe Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3, for the small and medium-sized business market, was out of the price range of these customers.' With Dell's strong presence in the Linux server market, Red Hat may want to listen."

Dave writes "There is a pretty amusing/sad article about functional illiteracy when it comes to professional e-mails. Some of the samples are just ridiculous."

rocketjam writes "According to CNET, German advertising technology company Adtech reports that during the months of October and November, Internet Explorer users were more than four times as likely to click on ads than Firefox users were. During the period 0.5 percent of IE users clicked on ads compared to 0.11 percent of Firefox users. Speculation on reasons for the difference in click rates range from Firefox's integrated pop-up blocking to seeing the average Firefox user as more tech-savvy the average Internet Explorer user."

yerdaddie writes "The cell processor will be introduced in graphics workstations before release in the Playstation 3, according to press releases by IBM and Sony. As previously discussed, IBM will be releasing more details in February 2005. However, apparently prototype workstations have already been "powered-on" and will be available in 2005. Since Windows on PPC was scrapped back in 1997, this leads to speculation that perhaps Linux, AIX, or BSD will be the operating system for cell workstations."

Wannabe Code Monkey writes "Sun has submitted their Common Development and Distribution License to the Open Source Initiative for approval as an Open Source license. It appears that this license is what Sun plans to release Solaris under according to an article at news.com.com.com. Of particular note is: 'The CDDL is not expected to be compatible with the GPL, since it contains requirements that are not in the GPL,' Claire Giordano of Sun's CDDL team said in its submission."

jZnat writes "CNet News.com reports that popular BitTorrent tracker hosts such as Suprnova and LokiTorrent underwent DDoS attacks on Wednesday (I'll bet you noticed). The culprits are primarily unknown, but these sites were flooded beyond control from the attack. This appears to be striking an interest in revising the BT protocol and Suprnova's interest in making their own protocol."

javaxman writes "Next spring, the U.S. military is expecting to deploy Talon robots with machine guns. They can also be equiped with rocket launchers. Really, they're remote-controlled 'bots, not true autonomous 'bots, so you can save the Skynet jokes for, um, some day in the not-to-distant future. This is just the first, or maybe second step. As for me, I just want to see arena matches between gangs of these suckers. Robot wars indeed!"

Iphtashu Fitz writes "CNet News is reporting that the CIA has been quietly investing in research programs to automatically monitor Internet chat rooms. In a two year agreement with the National Science Foundation, CIA officials were involved with the selection of recipients for research grants to develop automated chat room monitors. Researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute received $157,673 from the CIA and NSF for their proposal of 'a system to be deployed in the background of any chat room as a silent listener for eavesdropping ... The proposed system could aid the intelligence community to discover hidden communities and communication patterns in chat rooms without human intervention.' How soon until all IM conversations are monitored by Big Brother? The abstract of the proposal is available on the NFS website."

dereklam writes "The popularity of the iPod could be boosting Macs' popularity as well. News.com reports that 6 percent of iPod users have made the switch from PCs to Macs. An additional 7 percent said they are planning to dump their old PC for an Apple machine, according to the survey." I wish the linked story had more details; it's not clear from the results mentioned whether there's a strong causal relationship here.

An anonymous reader submits "Three of the Big Four music labels have reached licensing agreements to provide their music to the soon-to-launch Peer Impact network, a peer-to-peer service that enables legal music file-sharing."

Roland Piquepaille writes "When your newspapers write something about RFID tags, it's almost always about Wal-Mart or how these tags are threatening our privacy. But they often miss the important innovations brought by this technology. For example, in Florida, RFID drives highway traffic reports on more than 200 miles of toll roads. Or take DHL, which is tracking fashion with RFID tags on more than 70 million garments in its French distribution center. Elsewhere, in Texas, 28,000 students test an e-tagging system which promises better security for them. And what about RFID tags which could prevent surgical errors and have just been approved in the U.S last week? So, what do you think? Are these innovations promising a better future for us or not? For your convenience, this overview contains the essential details from the different articles mentioned above."

empraptor writes "Researchers at UC Berkeley have crunched numbers and determined that 130,000-260,000 excess votes went to Bush in Florida. They have held a conference and posted their findings online. You can find articles on their research from CNet, Wired News, and many other sources. While the research used statistical analysis based on past elections and demographics, how else do you verify that a paperless voting system is working properly?"

bigtangringo writes "First Samsung and now LG.Phillips have worked out a way to create thin CRT displays. Thin CRTs offer the best of both worlds -- superior picture quality with a slim size. Thin CRTs are expected to be more expensive than current CRTs, however they are also expected to drop in price rapidly. Both companies plan on releasing Thin CRTs in late 2005."

Danathar writes "It looks like the MPAA is pretty scared that Internet2 users are able to trade movies at high speed without them being able to know what's being traded, since you have to be a member of the Internet2 network to have a connection. As a result, they are asking to become a member."

baegucb_18706 writes "The front page of Google has a link to Keyhole where you can download a free trial of satellite imagery. Is it worth the cost for a subscription, and is it the start of the real commercialism for Google? And a challenge to MS's imagery?" D H NG writes "According to CNET, Google introduced a new service for academics called Google Scholar on Wednesday. This service searches scholarly literature such as technical reports, theses and abstracts. This service will not carry ads." And finally, reader ian@FalsePositives.com links to some speculation about how a sufficiently competent search engine could write the news itself.

rdurell writes "Microsoft is once again trying to get into the television market. This time they are teaming up with SBC Communications in a $400M deal to deliver television via IPTV through SBC's network. According to the article, Microsoft has spent $20B in its attempts to break into the market."

prostoalex writes "News.com has a lengthy 3-page article on Shawn Fanning's new venture, Snocap. After years of development the company is coming out of the stealth mode and has apparently already secured a distribution deal with Universal Music, promising to turn file-sharers into loyal paying customers overnight. Both News.com and Associated Press are skimpy on the details, but apparently Snocap will market the technology that will (a) sniff out the files shared illegally and (b) fill the peer-to-peer networks with licensed content and serve as a clearing house for the ventures who want to license digital music, but don't want to deal with gazillion of music labels." (We mentioned Snocap last in January.)

scubacuda points out this CNET story, writing "In addition to beefing up its storage (100MB -> 250MB), Yahoo! Mail has implemented Domain Keys to find spam. The idea is simple: give email providers a way to verify the domain and integrity of the messages sent. Sendmail, Inc. has released an open source implementation of the Yahoo! DomainKeys specification for testing on the Internet and is actively seeking participants and feedback for its Pilot Program. Yahoo! has submitted the DomainKeys framework as an Internet Draft, titled 'draft-delany-domainkeys-base-01.txt,' for publication with the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force). The patent license agreement can be found here."

rocketjam writes "CNET is running a long question-and-answer format article which takes an in-depth look at the relationship between Microsoft and SCO and the financial support SCO has received both directly and indirectly from Microsoft in their ongoing litigation alleging that Linux violates the intellectual property rights they claim to hold on UNIX. The article details the money Microsoft has paid to SCO to "license" UNIX as well as the role they played in BayStar's $50 million investment in SCO in late 2003. Microsoft paid SCO $16.6 million for a UNIX license. The only other company that has come close to paying SCO that much money for a license is Sun, who paid $9.3 million to license UNIX for their Solaris operating system."

Sivar writes "Ace's Hardware and news.com.com.com report Solaris that 10 has been released. Improvements include a performance-enhanced TCP-IP stack to shed the "Slowaris" moniker and their much-vaunted ZFS (Z File System). Solaris will initially be "free" (as in beer with an annual subscription fee for bug fixes and support), and will reportedly be released under an open-source license later." As well, KingSkippus writes "MSNBC reports, "After investing roughly $500 million and spending years of development time on its next-generation operating system, Sun Microsystems Inc. on Monday will announce an aggressive price for the software -- free. Sun also has promised make the underlying code of Solaris available under an open-source license, though the details have not been released." An article at Computerworld also has the story from Jonathan Schwartz, Sun's president and chief operating officer."

Sivar writes "Ace's Hardware and news.com.com.com report Solaris that 10 has been released. Improvements include a performance-enhanced TCP-IP stack to shed the "Slowaris" moniker and their much-vaunted ZFS (Z File System). Solaris will initially be "free" (as in beer with an annual subscription fee for bug fixes and support), and will reportedly be released under an open-source license later." As well, KingSkippus writes "MSNBC reports, "After investing roughly $500 million and spending years of development time on its next-generation operating system, Sun Microsystems Inc. on Monday will announce an aggressive price for the software -- free. Sun also has promised make the underlying code of Solaris available under an open-source license, though the details have not been released." An article at Computerworld also has the story from Jonathan Schwartz, Sun's president and chief operating officer."

TexasDex writes "C-Net tech news is reporting that users of Halo 2 who have installed mod chips are being banned from the X-box Live forums. It is unknown specifically how the Halo 2 game finds out the console is modded, Microsoft will only say in the X-box live Terms of Use that "Xbox Live may only be accessed with an unmodified [...] Xbox video game console.'" In related news, the New York Times (registration required) has a quickie interview with the folks behind Red Vs. Blue about changes Halo 2 bring to the series.

unassimilatible writes "In a snafu even better than forgetting to renew the Hotmail.com domain, it seems that Microsoft was a little late in registering 'Excel' as a trademark - 19 years late, to be exact. While MS claims it is protected by the common law of trademark, it may have abandoned the right to enforce the mark, as Savvysoft has been using the mark openly and conspicuously with TurboExcel for some time. TurboExcel, of course, runs on Linux, and MS just sent Savvysoft a cease-and-desist letter to stop using the mark. Apparently, 'Word' and 'Office' are also not registered marks of MS, but being generic terms, MS might have a lot more trouble trying to claim them as marks, as happened in the Lindows kerfuffle."

An anonymous reader writes "News.com is running a story about Rural Sourcing, a company attempting to make outsourcing to rural America as cost effective as sending jobs to India."

prostoalex writes "In a recent Slashdot story on Skype CEO interview some comments expressed displeasure with the fact that you have to be tied up to your computer to make those VOIP calls via Skype. Not anymore - this adapter from Siemens plugs into the USB port of the computer and allows Siemens Gigaset S645, Gigaset S440/445 or Gigaset C340/345 phone models to use the Skype connection instead of landline. News.com has the story."